Aktiia bracelet: When AI transforms the daily life of patients ...

The mixture of IOT technologies and AI is undoubtedly the future of medicine.Proof of this is the Aktia bracelet which constantly measures blood pressure and transforms the daily life of those who suffer from hypertension ...

Hypertension is often presented as the disease of the century.It is a silent disease that affects millions of French people (on a global scale one in four man would suffer from it and one in five women), many of them ignoring to be affected.And yet it is one of the most deadly diseases because it significantly increases the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

The best way to measure the blood pressure remains the good old tensiometer armband (also called Sphygmomanometer) which swells to measure the force with which the blood is pushed in the arteries.The problem of this device is that it cannot be worn all day, that it can be painful in some people, and that its effect is not completely neutral.Also avoid using it more than a few times a day. The blood pressure continues to evolve during the day according to your physical activities but also (and sometimes above all) depending on your stress.The drugs to control hypertension are quite delicate to dose because it would be theoretical to adapt the taking at the times of the day when hypertension phenomena are the most harmful to heart health.

The need for long -term surveillance ...

The dream of any cardiologist is to be able to have a non -invasive device that can control 24 and 7 days a week to understand and monitor the evolution of hypertension in the long term and adapt treatments toPatient lifestyle.This dream now becomes a reality thanks to the union of IoT and machine learning.

Taking continuous flow tension without hindering the patient's life in any way is precisely the objective that Aktia has set for itself.To get there, the startup imagined a small bracelet to wear on the right wrist all day.Light and elegant, it acts in silence by relying on a process called "PhotoPlethysmography" which uses a light transmitter and an associated sensor to capture the blood flow circulating in the arteries and obtain an image of the latter.

The idea of using optical wrists optical sensors to monitor blood flows have been around for years.All smartwatchs and other recent sports coaches have such sensors, but measures lack precision.This is why these devices are generally satisfied with a "stress" function which gives a vague idea of what the heart and arteries endeavor without providing exploitable medical information.

AI at the rescue

Aktia has developed a more precise sensor but especially algorithms based on machine learning to analyze blood flow and draw relevant information. The AI ​​was led at the start with more than a million blood pressure measures. The bracelet has been available for 1 year in Europe and has made it possible to collect more than 20 million additional measures to further refine the models. This artificial intelligence thus makes it possible to reliably approximate blood pressure in multiple circumstances and to make the Sufficiently precise bracelet measurements in multiple body positions. This bracelet is indeed the fruit of 17 years of research and multiple clinical trials whose results have also been published in nature and in specialized medicine magazines. device is considered a medical device and benefits from this Class IIA marking. Its systolic precision is 0.45 (+/- 7.75 mmHg) and its diastolic precision of 0.38 (+/- 6.86 mmHg). We are in the standards of most electronic tension measurement armbands.

What is its use?

The fact remains that the Aktiia bracelet is not intended to replace a real tension and an exam by a cardiologist or a doctor. Even if in use, tensioning turns out to be quite close to reality (if the calibration has been done, see below), this is not the primary vocation of this bracelet! "Aktiia is approved to facilitate Continuous monitoring of adult patients at home. It is not intended to be a diagnostic tool and does not collect the same data as an outpatient monitor of blood pressure, "said the.aktia manual is really a daily tool that allows long -term surveillance and long -term surveillance and long -term monitoring and All day (including at night or during a sporting activity) of the evolution of tension. Its relevance does not reside so much in the accuracy of the values ​​displayed at a "T time" as in the observation day after day, week after week, month after month of heart behavior. The information collected over time is valuable for your cardiologist because it can allow it to best adjust the treatments against hypertension. At the same time, the objective is not that the user is constantly riveted on the measures. No need to add stress anxiety. The bracelet must be seen as a companion to fight against this disease that is hypertension. In addition to this notion of monitoring over time, Aktiia allows everyone to better understand and view the impact of lifestyle changes (regular physical exercise, diet and even why not yoga and meditation effects) on their blood pressure . It is therefore also an educational tool for the user.

What do we find in the box?

For the moment, Aktia is mainly on sale on the manufacturer's website.The company has chosen a direct sale to consumers.A choice that may not be the most relevant but the fastest.In general, it seems more advised to associate the acquisition of this bracelet with a follow -up by a doctor or a cardiologist.Besides, Aktia has just started on the American market and favors partnerships there with cardiology centers.

Once ordered, the box includes the Aktiia bracelet, a USB load base and a fairly traditional tensioning bluetooth brassard except that it has no display.

This whole set is initiated, can be used and controlled from an application to be installed on your smartphone.

A delicate start -up

Once all the elements are unlocked and loaded, the user will be confronted with what is the most delicate and most demanding phase: the calibration of the bracelet.

On the paper, the operation is not very complicated: we put the bracelet on his right wrist, the electronic armband on the left arm, then we launch the application, we appear in Bluetooth the bracelet and the brassard on the smartphone, andThe application does everything else by inflating the armband twice in a row and by correlating data of the brassard and bracelet data. The problem is that in practice the operation is anything but a pleasure.First, the pairing of the two Bluetooth devices is sometimes recalcitrant.Then the armband swells rather strong, which can be painful if it was too tight at the start.But above all, the calibration fails three times out of four.As the operation cannot be repeated immediately for health reasons, it must sometimes be repeated three times a day before succeeding it.

The problem is that this calibration manipulation should be reproduced at least once a month.And each time, it's the same test.Over time, we learn to optimize the chances of success by doing the operation at a time when we are very relaxed and warm.

Nevertheless, one cannot help but think that it would probably have been simpler and more precise to go through the cardiologist, the family doctor or even a pharmacist to carry out an optimal calibration rather than by this completely automatic operation which certainly has the'Advantage of being in total autonomy but is often painful.But such a scenario is not supported by the solution.

Living on a daily basis with Aktiia

Once the calibration is successful, the armband can be stored in the closet (it only serves once a month) and we start to live on a daily basis with the bracelet by forgetting it.Especially since it displays a reasonable autonomy.It must be roughly recharging it once a week even if officially the autonomy is 9 days.

As it is fine and light, and it should not be too tight on the wrist, you quickly forget its presence.However, it is essential to remember that the bracelet is not at all waterproof!It is therefore necessary to systematically remove it before showering or diving into the pool.

The application displays the evolution of your tension on the day, the week or the month.It thus makes it possible to check the impact on your tension of your possible medication or the impact of your newly launched diet.It also makes it possible to measure the impact of stress by displaying your average tension during the working days and your tension during the weekend.

However, we regret that this small bracelet does not go beyond blood pressure information.It would have been typically appreciated that it also displays the variations in heart rate, body temperature, the amount of oxygen in the blood and other measures likely to interest a cardiologist or reflecting the general functioning of the heart system.The application nevertheless indicates the average heart rate at rest.But there is no instantaneous measurement.

Follow -up for cardiologists

However, Aktiia’s main interest, and the objective openly pursued by the manufacturer, is to produce data on which your cardiologist or doctor will be able to base his medical decisions.

Thus, the application produces a report that can be sent by email or print to a healthcare professional who presents a summary of all that the sensor has gleaned. It is also interesting to note that thisReport is ultimately much more complete and instructive than the dashboard displayed on a daily basis by the application. For the moment, health experts must however be satisfied with this report.They have no access to raw data.But maybe Aktiia will offer them such a long-term service.

In the end, the Aktiia bracelet inaugurates a new generation of IoT Wearables (connected objects that we carry on oneself) intended for both patients and practitioners.It’s an original approach.And this is also what sets out this bracelet the most while Apple, Samsung or Fitbit are trying on their side to add a real tension to their connected watches.So far their results are far from having the relevance of those of Aktiia.